#suctorian

CC: "This strange-looking microbe is a Suctorian, and it's sort of the ugly duckling of ciliates. Not because they're ugly, but because like the poor fabled cygnet, suctorians do not bear a resemblance to the rest of their ciliate family."

Journey to the Microcosmos- Suctorians: The Ugly Duckling of Ciliates

Images Originally Captured by Jam's Germs

"Their tentacles are like a Swiss Army knife. When hunting, they act as a poison-tipped harpoon. And when eating, they act like a straw. After the suctorian latches onto its prey, the membrane of its tentacle merges with the membrane of its food, creating a shared surface that lets the suctorian begin to consume the inside of its food. The rounded end begins to form a pocket that travels inwards, carrying bits of the suctorian's prey with it."

Journey to the Microcosmos- Suctorians: The Ugly Duckling of Ciliates

Images Originally Captured by Jam's Germs

"For a eukaryote to be classified as a ciliate, it really needs to meet one important criteria: it needs to have those short little hairs called cilia. And with such lax requirements, it's not surprising that ciliates can take on so many different forms. You've got the long-necked lacrymaria olor. The trumpet-y stentor coeruleus. The springy floral of the vorticella. They may look very different from one another, but they're all decorated with cilia that help them move or eat."

Journey to the Microcosmos- Suctorians: The Ugly Duckling of Ciliates

Images Originally Captured by Jam's Germs

"Suctorians do not have one butthole, nor do they have many buttholes. Instead, different species had to devise their own waste disposal methods. Some of them create little waste-specific regions in their body, which then periodically get removed. Others get rid of waste at the base of their tentacles. But if they don't get rid of that waste fast enough, they can potentially feed themselves to death. It's just one of those reminders from the microcosmos not to take the little things, like being able to poop, for granted."

Journey to the Microcosmos- Suctorians: The Ugly Duckling of Ciliates

Images Originally Captured by Jam's Germs

"But suctorian's differ in one crucial feature: the mouth. They don't have one. Or rather, they don't have the oral cavity that seems kind of mouth-like in other microbes. But they do have a very special kind of tentacle that lets them have something even better... many mouths, which is a trait called polystomy."

Journey to the Microcosmos- Suctorians: The Ugly Duckling of Ciliates

"As they grow older, the suctorians settle into different forms, like the ones we've been watching for most of this video. The maturing suctorians create stalks that attach to whatever substrate seems most appealing, which can even include the bodies of other animals. And that's where they will stay, exchanging cilia for tentacles, and swarming for sessility--a lack of mobility."

Journey to the Microcosmos- Suctorians: The Ugly Duckling of Ciliates

"There are, after all, many ways to be anything including ciliates. And to be temporarily one is means to the suctorian's own ends, a way of life that has little concern for human understanding or classification, but that delights us not in spite of its resistance to classification... but because of it."

Journey to the Microcosmos- Suctorians: The Ugly Duckling of Ciliates

CC: "Well, let's just watch this suctorian for a bit--the oval with its tentacles latched onto some unfortunate ciliate prey. It's eating and eating, but you can see the suctorian begin to push some round thing out of itself. And then...a thing so exciting it caught out master of microscopes James off guard for a second there, but that little round thing that came out is a swarmer, a little bitty baby suctorian that has budded off its parent."

Journey to the Microcosmos- Suctorians: The Ugly Duckling of Ciliates

Images Originally Captured by Jam's Germs